WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:14.200 This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,938 for Wednesday 6th of September 2023. 00:14.200 --> 00:19.840 Today's show is entitled an open directory of web audio stream. 00:19.840 --> 00:24.520 It is hosted by D&T and is about 19 minutes long. 00:24.520 --> 00:27.120 It carries a clean flag. 00:27.120 --> 00:32.640 The summary is I was looking for an open directory of web audio streams and found radio 00:32.640 --> 00:41.480 hyphen browser.info. 00:41.480 --> 00:46.320 Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio. 00:46.320 --> 00:52.680 I would like to talk for a moment about internet radio. 00:52.680 --> 01:03.680 So to speak, on my journey to have less non-free things, let's say, in my life. 01:03.680 --> 01:12.520 I recently unsubscribed to the music streaming platform that I used to use and I went 01:12.520 --> 01:22.360 back to this old library of MP3 files that I had collected over time that I had. 01:22.360 --> 01:27.640 And it is not very large compared to a lot of other people have. 01:27.640 --> 01:35.960 So I haven't added to this library in many years now and I originally acquired them 01:35.960 --> 01:44.920 through various means and I used subsonic to listen to them for a long time. 01:44.920 --> 01:49.040 So I decided I was going to try to do something like that again. 01:49.040 --> 01:57.160 I actually installed Funk Whale and thank you to those who have recorded Hacker Public 01:57.160 --> 02:00.440 Radio episodes before about Funk Whale. 02:00.440 --> 02:05.600 There was one great episode in which you can interview one of the developers. 02:05.600 --> 02:07.080 I think that was a great episode. 02:07.080 --> 02:12.480 I recommend you check it out if you're interested in this Funk Whale is a music streaming 02:12.480 --> 02:17.800 platform that you can host yourself and it can federate. 02:17.800 --> 02:25.840 And that's cool because there are some instances out there that have free content of creative 02:25.840 --> 02:29.280 commons or otherwise licensed music. 02:29.280 --> 02:33.920 So you can connect to those instances and listen to that from your own instance. 02:33.920 --> 02:37.080 So I set that up on a Raspberry Pi but it was too heavy for it. 02:37.080 --> 02:41.920 So I have this other small laptop that I can use for that too. 02:41.920 --> 02:47.920 So I will set that up again soon just for myself really. 02:47.920 --> 02:56.320 And then maybe try to see if I can organize committing the money I would spend on the streaming 02:56.320 --> 03:05.520 service toward maybe buying records from a specific musicians and things or something like 03:05.520 --> 03:06.520 that. 03:06.520 --> 03:07.920 I don't know all see. 03:07.920 --> 03:12.080 So then I remember tune in radio. 03:12.080 --> 03:14.360 Some of you may know tune in radio. 03:14.360 --> 03:22.480 That was a mobile app that has a directory of streams. 03:22.480 --> 03:30.000 And it's pretty interesting because you could look up streams by the country and then 03:30.000 --> 03:35.600 you could listen to radio stations from way out somewhere you've never been ever really 03:35.680 --> 03:40.840 thought about and that can be a kind of an interesting experience and also it's a way 03:40.840 --> 03:48.240 I could listen to radio stations from back where I come from which is a Rio in Brazil. 03:48.240 --> 03:56.520 To be honest I kind of feel like to some extent it's a little bit irrelevant to buy records 03:56.520 --> 04:05.560 if you're mostly buying if you are mostly interested in in pretty old music, right? 04:05.560 --> 04:11.840 And you're you know it's kind of like a movie from 30 years ago let's say like that's 04:11.840 --> 04:21.000 it really makes sense to buy a movie from that was made 30 years ago. 04:21.000 --> 04:27.040 Should the distributor or the producer really still be making money off of that? 04:27.040 --> 04:31.680 And more importantly are they still really making money off of that? 04:31.720 --> 04:40.480 No there's a reason why these organizations like the recording industry and so on. 04:40.480 --> 04:51.200 They mostly focus on today's popular artists when they talk about fighting copyright infringement. 04:51.200 --> 04:56.720 Now to be sure I wouldn't apply this to things like the criterion collection because 04:56.800 --> 05:06.400 they you know they'll often remaster, retransfer, older films for real release and they often come 05:06.400 --> 05:12.800 with unpublished previously unpublished commentary tracks and things like that. 05:12.800 --> 05:16.840 So that is a new work that's being produced, right? 05:17.640 --> 05:27.080 So so then in that case of course it makes sense to for someone to to make it and sell it and 05:27.080 --> 05:36.040 for people to buy it. But when you make such a release and then 30 years later they are still 05:36.680 --> 05:45.560 the company is still extracting rents from from that. I honestly in my opinion our society shouldn't 05:46.520 --> 05:52.840 be providing the infrastructure for them to do that. That's not good for society. But anyway moving on 05:54.120 --> 05:59.320 I have downloaded Tune in radio and it was an absolutely awful experience because 06:00.120 --> 06:08.920 you know they want you to pay. They want you to pay to use their app. They it's like very 06:09.000 --> 06:16.040 intrusive with lots of ads and things and you know in general it's one of those experiences 06:16.040 --> 06:21.400 we all know or you download an app because you want to listen to these radio stations that 06:22.440 --> 06:27.400 you know thousands and thousands of radio stations around the world put on the internet for free 06:28.680 --> 06:35.000 and then for some reason there's this gatekeeper now which is in this case Tune in radio. 06:35.960 --> 06:42.840 It's become more intrusive, more or whatever this is that we're talking about that would 06:42.840 --> 06:51.000 talk about often. It's become more of that. So I figured you know what there might be a directory, 06:51.000 --> 06:57.560 a free directory, a community, a driven directory of radio stations out there. So I looked 06:57.560 --> 07:04.520 that up for a while and then I found one. The URL is radio, hyphen, browser.info. 07:06.360 --> 07:13.400 Radio, hyphen, browser.info. So it's quite good. It's just what I was looking for 07:14.280 --> 07:22.440 and on that on their website there is a listing of applications that use its API 07:22.440 --> 07:32.120 took to access its directory and then so then I went looking through those and let's take a 07:32.120 --> 07:42.520 look at that real quick apps. Okay so for Android we had RadioDroid 2 open radio transistors 07:43.000 --> 07:52.600 transistor and so on. So I try now open radio. It is available only on the Google Play Store 07:53.400 --> 08:01.160 and the thing for me is it's kind of a pain that I want to use Android audio. I mean Auto. 08:01.880 --> 08:08.760 What I mean by this is that the app has a version of it for Android Auto which is the software that 08:09.720 --> 08:18.040 runs on the center console of many newer cars. You have the app on your Android phone and then 08:18.040 --> 08:25.400 when you connect the phone to the car and you get Android Auto on the car center console screen 08:25.960 --> 08:31.800 that app will appear there in the app menu. That's what it means for an app to have an 08:31.800 --> 08:38.840 Android Auto version so that I can you know any application to do with sound it will be a plus 08:38.840 --> 08:47.720 if it has an Android audio version or whatever and that means that it's kind of it kind of makes 08:47.720 --> 08:53.400 the whole thing a little less free because Android audio is a component that is part of the Google 08:53.400 --> 09:03.000 apps it's not part of the open source Android so but you know that's that so then yeah I 09:03.000 --> 09:12.360 looked around and I found that open radio and this other one called tune fmr2 applications that 09:12.360 --> 09:18.760 work with Android audio and again I said Android audio but it was supposed to be Android Auto 09:19.720 --> 09:25.480 and then that also means that even if the app is available on fdroid you have to install it 09:26.040 --> 09:33.000 via Google Play Store to get the Android audio part I think that's what I read somewhere I didn't 09:33.000 --> 09:43.080 test that so open radio is really good but it's kind of buggy on Android audio actually very buggy 09:43.400 --> 09:48.760 it makes it pretty hard to use I don't know exactly what happens but you go to your 09:50.520 --> 09:58.040 favorites and you can try to switch to a different station sometimes it gets in some kind of a 09:58.040 --> 10:04.520 func where it won't switch it will just reload the same station again it just kind of gets locked in that 10:04.520 --> 10:10.040 state and there's also something weird that happens with a kind of a playlist functionality in it 10:10.440 --> 10:15.880 you advance as if you were advancing to a different track and it will just move to other 10:15.880 --> 10:21.320 stations and I don't know where it's getting these stations from I think they might be the popular 10:21.320 --> 10:31.960 list that's in this app I don't know but so anyway I gave up on that then trying tune fm that is 10:32.760 --> 10:42.120 has a ton of ads now it's pretty bad there are ads when you're scrolling through your stations even 10:42.120 --> 10:49.400 when you're scrolling through your favorites like the app on the phone is really not very good because 10:49.400 --> 10:56.040 it has very intrusive ads now you can't pay to remove the ads and that's probably what I will do 10:57.000 --> 11:06.920 but the Android audio part works so far it has worked perfectly and there are no ads in the 11:06.920 --> 11:18.120 Android Auto part now another app I've tried is transistor transistor for the Android that one is 11:18.120 --> 11:25.720 really good but it doesn't have Android Auto I don't think and but otherwise the interface is 11:26.440 --> 11:32.360 almost perfect I think the only thing that's kind of inconvenient about it is the when you're 11:32.360 --> 11:40.040 when you're trying to search for a radio station it's it's just not very 11:42.520 --> 11:49.160 I guess like rich or something there's not a not such a great interface for doing that but once you 11:49.160 --> 11:58.520 add your stations you know it's just great so I'm finding that that's really good replacement for 11:59.080 --> 12:05.960 these music apps because as it happens with so many things we we get used to the idea that we 12:05.960 --> 12:12.360 we we should just always be picking the music we're going to listen to and things like that 12:13.000 --> 12:22.680 and we end up agreeing that that is just better right without a various specific 12:25.640 --> 12:34.920 logical explanation for why that would be better and we don't ponder the ways in which it's worse 12:36.200 --> 12:41.560 but you know for a very long time we didn't really do that very much and we had to make the decision to buy 12:43.000 --> 12:51.880 a disk or a record or something when we really light something now it's like everything is basically 12:51.880 --> 13:01.480 the same you might kind of like whether you you just were really captivated by some music 13:02.040 --> 13:06.280 or you just heard about it you it's the same thing you have the album right there in the 13:07.000 --> 13:12.200 in your music streaming app unless you don't of course which then if you don't you're you're 13:12.200 --> 13:20.360 screwed right so I've been doing that then it's been pretty fun listening mostly to three stations 13:20.360 --> 13:29.160 from from back in Brazil from Rio so that's been just great and as far as purchasing music 13:29.800 --> 13:34.680 so far I'm finding that it's pretty hard to purchase music music nowadays a lot of 13:35.640 --> 13:41.240 it seems like a lot of artists don't really don't really do that or something 13:41.960 --> 13:47.720 and there's almost no such thing as a record store anymore there actually is one even close to 13:47.720 --> 13:57.160 me but you know they it's like antique record shop kind of thing they generally won't have new 13:57.240 --> 14:04.840 records right so again you're kind of in a space that's somewhat marginalized by mainstream 14:04.840 --> 14:11.320 capitalism which is great but it is not exactly what I'm trying to do in this case right what I'm 14:11.320 --> 14:17.000 thinking about is how could I enjoy some new music whenever I find some that's good you know 14:17.000 --> 14:26.680 way then makes sense and also agrees to some of my terms so not sure how how that's going to 14:26.680 --> 14:31.800 work out but we'll see and then you know you can also listen to music on YouTube I'm thinking 14:31.800 --> 14:37.240 about you know if I really like some music that I listen to on the radio which which has happened 14:37.240 --> 14:46.600 pretty recently I might just go to YouTube and then use YouTube DL to record the music 14:46.680 --> 14:52.280 as if I were listening to it on the radio and recording it to my cassette tape but that wouldn't 14:52.280 --> 14:58.280 be my preference because I understand that to the copyright proponents there's something fundamentally 14:58.280 --> 15:05.960 different about kind of serendipitously recording a song as it's playing on the radio and 15:07.720 --> 15:14.760 actually queuing up the the same song that you're going to record you know although I would rather 15:15.720 --> 15:26.120 have the access to culture be free and add free I don't necessarily think that the solution for 15:26.120 --> 15:33.240 it is to just use technical means to bypass restrictions that others are trying to put in place 15:34.040 --> 15:44.440 in my view the reason that has emerged is as a way for people to overcome an untenable situation 15:44.920 --> 15:51.400 that wasn't of their own making so another thing that I think is worth noting here is that depending 15:51.400 --> 15:59.560 on your selection of radio stations you may be kind of right back where you started you may be no 15:59.560 --> 16:06.600 better than the streaming services right in fact you may be worse off because you may be just 16:06.600 --> 16:16.440 listening to things you know that the selections are not being made for your cultural enrichment 16:17.080 --> 16:26.040 but for other various reasons so in in my case I've been listening mostly to stations that are 16:27.560 --> 16:35.160 owned by the government in Brazil so there are kind of no ads there there are sometimes 16:37.560 --> 16:46.120 sort of ads for local theater productions that are happening in town and things like that I guess 16:46.120 --> 16:55.080 you could say those are ads in a way but there aren't ads in the traditional sense and the programming 16:55.080 --> 17:05.160 is generally designed to convey Brazilian culture, Brazilian music to the listener 17:06.120 --> 17:13.560 rather than you know create advertising space to sell I think that makes a big difference so if there 17:13.560 --> 17:18.680 are such stations you might be interested in listening to I would recommend you try it out 17:19.960 --> 17:27.240 so that's how much time I will take from you thank you for listening I thought maybe a few people 17:27.240 --> 17:32.680 would be interested in knowing about this radio browser dot info radio hyphen browser dot info 17:33.240 --> 17:40.840 website that this exists in its community driven resource and maybe some other people would be 17:40.840 --> 17:49.080 interested in trying out all that I will put in the show notes the links to three stations that I've 17:49.080 --> 17:57.000 been listening to just for fun because you know I get to do it so yeah maybe if you are 17:57.000 --> 18:05.000 if you'd be interested in checking out some Brazilian music tune into that all right and let me know 18:05.000 --> 18:11.800 in the comments if you try and hear this out or you know if you have had your own thoughts on this type 18:11.800 --> 18:20.760 of experience trying out alternative to these super commercial streaming web 2.0 things 18:21.400 --> 18:28.120 then please record a show this is something that I've been thinking a lot about in many areas 18:28.120 --> 18:36.600 of life and I would be interested in hearing other perspectives and experiences all right so the way 18:36.600 --> 18:44.040 you can do that is just like I just did you record yourself talking about it and then you go to 18:44.040 --> 18:52.040 hacker public radio you click where it says upload pick a date and then just kind of follow the prompt 18:52.040 --> 19:00.200 on the on the website you will have to go to your email to get the actual link where you upload 19:00.200 --> 19:08.920 your audio and then you will become a hacker public radio contributor and you know the magic 19:08.920 --> 19:16.040 starts there all right thank you for tuning in come back tomorrow for another one I'll see you later bye 19:19.240 --> 19:25.160 you have been listening to hacker public radio as hacker public radio does a work today show was 19:25.160 --> 19:31.800 contributed by a hbware listener like yourself if you ever thought of recording podcast you click on 19:31.800 --> 19:39.400 our contributing to find out how easy it means hosting price we are has been kindly provided by 19:39.400 --> 19:47.480 an onsthost.com internet archive and our synced.net on the satellite stages they show is released 19:47.480 --> 19:56.680 on our creative comments attribution for pointo international license